Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Finance and Debt Reduction) Share this | Hansard source

I will go through the cost. The cost through your smelly tax and through your dirty little trick is to wind your way into the hands of working families and then to put out on the street the working families and the coalminers. What happened to you? You have changed. You no longer care for the working family. You have been sucked into the machine. You are now a machine man. You sit back there, you machine man. It is $4½ billion. They are going to start off with $4½ billion, next year $11½ billion, then $12 billion and then $12½ billion. They are going to rip in excess of $40 billion out of their working families with this naïve approach where they do not believe that cost will be handed on. It will be handed on to your working families.

Why do you not acknowledge that the issue has changed? Your working families, pensioners, farmers and Australian consumers are saying, ‘We do not want to go down this path.’ You are so arrogant and so conceited that you have brought back to the parliament, as the premier item of your agenda, the emissions trading scheme. That is apparently what you are all about. If you want to know what the Labor Party is about, it is the emissions trading scheme. That is what defines the Australian Labor Party. To quote Paul John Keating once more, we are so happy you have brought it back because we are going to do you slowly. Slowly, day by day and piece by piece we are going to drag you in here and see if you have got the courage and conviction to nominate the increase in costs to the people who will have to pay, the people who gave you the Treasury bench. Is this the reward that you have delivered to them? What we have delivered is a multifaceted environmental policy, for which the costs are controlled and for which we can budget, which is completely unlike yours. And then we hear the Greens say ‘a reward to polluters’. It is your scheme that ultimately ends up paying them $40 billion, not ours. It is your scheme that delivers the buckets of money to the major coal companies, not ours. Ours is a clean scheme. It costs $3.2 billion. People ask where that is going to come from.

Here is the Labor Party, who over the next four years are going to spend about $1.4 trillion—$1.4 trillion in expenditure—and we are going to be looking for $3.2 billion. That is 0.2 of one per cent of your expenditure. I reckon we can find it. I reckon we can find that 0.2 of one per cent of your expenditure. But I tell you what else costs $3.2 billion—